Goldman Sachs Leads $44 Million Investment in Plaid

In a round led by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, Plaid Technologies has raised $44 million in new investment. Plaid co-founder and CEO Zach Perret, whose company was part of the inaugural FinDEVr developers conference in 2014, said that the new capital would help Plaid scale its operations. “The pace of innovation in financial services is just starting to ramp up, and we’re excited to collaborate with financial institutions, incumbents, and new startups to build the tools that consumers and businesses need to live better financial lives,” Perret said.

Also participating in the Series B were existing investors, Box Group, GV, New Enterprise Associates, and Spark Capital. The funding takes Plaid’s total to more than $59 million.

Pictured: Plaid CEO and co-founder Zach Perret during his presentation, “Plaid: API for Financial Infrastructure” at FinDEVr San Francisco 2014.

Writing on the Plaid Team blog, Perret and fellow co-founder William Hockey reflected their company’s journey to this point, beginning with Zach and William’s efforts to develop a consumer personal finance app years ago. “We spent nearly a year wrestling with every financial dataset available, but ultimately found that any product we created would be forever limited by a lack of basic developer infrastructure,” the pair wrote. “APIs weren’t even an afterthought. So that’s what we built.”

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in San Francisco, Plaid specializes in building APIs that help fintech developers extract account information and high-context data from transactions. And with Intuit Developer Group’sdecision to discontinue its Financial Services APIs in March, Plaid is one of the few, remaining major firms in the U.S. that provides financial account aggregation services (others are Finovate alums, Finicity and Envestnet | Yodlee). In addition to its aggregate bank data and ACH account authentication solutions, Plaid provides a suite of products (Connect, Auth, Info, Balance, and Risk) that have collectively analyzed more than six billion transactions. The company includes fintech innovators (and Finovate alums) like Betterment, Coinbase, TransferWise, Venmo, and Wealthfront among its partners.

Do you help put the “tech” in fintech? Join us this fall for FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016, October 18 & 19. Our two-day developers conference features the latest APIs, platforms, and tools developers are using to build the future of fintech today.